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		<title>A house-hunting trip that involved no house-hunting &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/08-August/27.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>A house-hunting trip that involved no house-hunting</h1>
			<p>Day 00539: Saturday, 2016 August 27</p>
		</header>
<p>
	Last night, <a href="/en/domains/newdawn.local.xhtml"><code>//newdawn.local.</code></a> was behaving a bit strangely, saying that it was fully charges and keeping it&apos;s charge, though the color of the battery indicator hinted that the laptop was instead discharging.
	Stupidly, I wrote it off and went to bed, probably partially because I was exhausted.
	When I awoke this morning though, I found that my laptop had completely discharged and shut off.
	Lovely.
	It&apos;s difficult getting the power cords to work at all, and when they do work, it&apos;s often only when in contorted positions.
	I managed to partially repair my scary, buzzing cord though.
	Now, it works in almost any reasonable position.
	What a relief! I was starting to again fear that the problem wasn&apos;t the laptop cords, but the power jack of the computer.
	There has been one regression in the cord&apos;s state though.
	Now, instead of buzzing only when charging (as opposed to when simply maintaining a full charge), the cord buzzes nonstop as long as it is plugged both into the laptop and into the wall.
	Seriously, as soon as I have a stable address, I need to get a pair of laptop cords (one to use and one as a spare) ordered online.
	This one&apos;s just scary!
</p>
<p>
	The stretchy, spiral cord that I&apos;ve been using to attach my mobile to my belt loop is a bit <strong>*too*</strong> long or stretchy.
	If I were to drop my mobile, it&apos;d be allowed to hit the ground, and with the current case being as poor quality as it is, it might not stop the device from cracking.
	I decided to swap out that spiral cord for the Cricket lanyard that I picked up yesterday.
	Bad idea.
	That lanyard&apos;s metal components have a large protrusion on either side and one of them mangled the device&apos;s screen protector.
	I knew that that type of screen protector wasn&apos;t to be trusted ...
	I&apos;ll see if I can find a better lanyard when I get the chance, but I&apos;ll also need to get a better case for the device (or at the very least, replace the mangled screen protector).
</p>
<p>
	Cyrus, Vanessa, our mother, and I headed to Salem, supposedly to look for a home.
	However, things didn&apos;t exactly go that way.
</p>
<p>
	First, we went to Aumsville&apos;s corn festival.
	There, we were given gratis, cooked cobs of corn.
	Cyrus and I specifically asked for ours without butter, but anyone that didn&apos;t specifically ask for the butter to be left off ended up with buttered corn.
	Our mother found a dime-tossing game, which they played along with Cyrus and Vanessa.
	Sadly, there were a couple fish in vases among the dishes, and though they were covered so that dimes didn&apos;t land in their water, they darted every time that a dime hit something near them.
	They must have been scared out of their minds! Our mother was surprised that I didn&apos;t want to play, but either way, I&apos;d lose that game.
	If you fail to land your dime in a dish, you&apos;ve lost the dime for nothing.
	If you successfully land the dime in a dish, you still lose the dime, but you also get that dish.
	I could have aimed at dishes that were far from the fish, but it doesn&apos;t nullify one simple fact: I don&apos;t need more junk to bring with in the move or try to get rid of.
	Apparently though, my mother finds this game to be quite fun.
	They didn&apos;t even want the dishes, and after they were done tossing away their dimes, they even <strong>*gave most of the dishes back to the people running the game*</strong>.
	I&apos;m not sure what the people running the game thought of that! Next, w stopped at a chiropractor&apos;s booth.
	They used some sort of electronic device to quantify how bad my mother&apos;s and my necks and backs are, then recommended that we see a chiropractor a bit closer to home than them.
	Probably the most important booth that we stopped at an energy efficiency booth, where much to my surprise, my mother bought three six-packs of <abbr title="light-emitting diode">LED</abbr> light bulbs for ten dollars each! Usually, my mother is a bit strange about energy-efficient lighting and kind of stays away from it.
	Before heading out, we picked up two ten-packs of corn ears for a dollar each.
	That&apos;s some cheap corn!
</p>
<p>
	When we stopped for lunch, Vanessa pulled out their laptop, which apparently our mother had asked them to bring, and our mother used the restaurant&apos;s Wi-Fi access point to browse craigslist.
	It seems like the main point of our trip to Salem was to evade craigslist&apos;s noxious <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> ban! We could have done that a lot closer to home, say, at the Springfield City Hall Public Library? Not only that, but my mother&apos;s insistence to continue using craigslist is a bit worrisome, and my mother continues to blame proxies for the issues, not those that maliciously discriminate against proxies.
	As it turned out though, my mother wasn&apos;t able to browse some of the listings because the the restaurant&apos;s access point censored certain websites and these listings were not on the main website.
	As I told my mother, a proxy would have allowed us to evade such censorship.
	Proxies are not the enemy, those that maliciously block proxies are.
</p>
<p>
	In Salem, our mother pretty much just drove us around the town showing us the two main commercial hubs of the town; there was no actual house hunting involved.
	It appears that our mother wants to live near either of these two areas, as each contains a Winco, my mother&apos;s favorite grocery store.
	If we do end up living near one of these places, the fact that they&apos;re comercial hubs means that I&apos;ll also have many places to apply for work that are within walking distance.
	There&apos;s even a T-Mobile store near at least one of them, where I can pay my monthly bill in person.
	If we live near one of these hubs, Salem should be a decent place to live as a pedestrian/cyclist, I think.
</p>
<p>
	The GT-i9100M&apos;s battery life sucks.
	It did not survive the trip, and I had to shut the mobile off near the end to keep it from completely draining the battery.
	I still miss my GT-i9300, which had better battery life.
</p>
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